The question, “What have facts to do with faith?” expresses a rather widely prevalent suspicion regarding the religious value of the facts recorded in the gospels and summarized in the creeds; and it deserves consideration by every one who has religious interests at heart, since it brings up vital problems concerning the possibility of revelation and the value of the Christian faith. Two allied questions have been much debated recently in this country, although they were pretty well threshed out in Germany a decade or two ago; first, what obligations rest upon a man who subscribes to the Christian creeds; and, secondly, whether it is not desirable that the creeds should be so changed, or be given such meanings, that no one would be obliged in confessing his faith to make any assertion concerning matters of historical fact. Back of these questions lies a more fundamental and more practical one: What value have facts for our religious faith? Of what value for our religious life is it to affirm in our creeds the truth of such historical happenings as, “He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; the third day He rose again from the dead”? Of what value is it to read or hear such Scriptures as those which tell us that Christ healed the palsied man let down through the roof, and the blind man who called to him from the wayside; or raised the widow's only son; or had compassion on the multitudes, and fed them? It must be granted, we are told, that doubts may always arise about historical events, since historical knowledge rests on human testimony with all its weaknesses; and granted, too, that events seem but a dry and cold substitute for the living faith craved by our hearts. Would it not, then, be well, we are asked, to omit from our creeds matters of fact (or alleged fact), and to reduce our gospels to “the Words of the Christ”? If not, some sound reason ought to be given for retaining the gospel narratives of our Lord's marvellous deeds, which are stumbling-stones to many feet seeking the path of righteousness, and for affirming in the creeds the most notable events of his life instead of simply calling him Master.

This dictionary has been prepared because Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible and the Encyclopaedia Biblica have been found too “discursive” for handy use. It is intended for educated ministers, who “have not always the leisure to enter into a discursive presentation of critical research”; for Sunday-school teachers and workers; and for intelligent laymen interested in Bible study. To serve such readers, the dictionary should be accurate but not technical; “it should be up to the day in its information, but not so discursive as to burden its pages with the pedantry of undigested facts.”

Whoever reads the meditations of Marcus Aurelius must be impressed with the constant self-examination which the writer practised. Far on the northern boundaries of his empire, among the Quadi, on the banks of the Gran, he composed his first book, analyzing his own nature, gratefully recounting his obligations to his kin, his teachers, and his friends. All the succeeding books grow out of a similar self-examination, accompanied by self-directed exhortations to fidelity, constancy, and patience. The title which the work bears is indeed the only possible one—To Himself—for self is alike the subject and the object of the author's meditations. The emperor's simple humility, his high desire to fulfil in every way his duty, his patient humanity, shut out effectively all priggishness and offensive egotism from his pages. Marcus Aurelius was not alone in his concern for self. If we look into other ranks of life in the second century, we find the same interest. With all its peace, calm, and nobility, the age of the Antonines was an age of egoism, of valetudinarianism both of body and of soul. Aristides the rhetorician has left us an account of his long and impassioned search for health, which for him was a religious quest. Apuleius, in his anxiety for his soul, had himself initiated into all possible sacred mysteries, until he at last found rest in the holy brotherhood of the servants of Isis. The emperor, the rhetorician, and the superstitious mystic furnish three striking illustrations of the tendency of the time.

It is difficult to think of Robert Louis Stevenson as other than the creator of delightful and weird romances. His name always calls up Treasure Island—not to mention the other progeny of his fruitful imagination—Treasure Island and the higher geography. Stevenson will always stand forth as master of the finest artistry and as a modern symbol of the imagination. And it seems nothing short of sheer prose to turn from the fairy world flung into space by the deftness and swiftness of this man's fancy to our gray world of every day.

Yet Dr. Japp and Mr. Zangwill both insist that he will finally be remembered as an essayist and not as a romancer. We must all of us agree, I think, that whatever comes of Stevenson the fictionist, Stevenson the essayist has enriched the world by his half-dozen slim volumes of comment on life and men. If we think of the essay as a bit of preachment, we may still think of Stevenson as an essayist. He seems to like the rôle of preacher; and whatever our own homiletical notions may be, we must admit that his preaching is always fresh, human, and in good spirit; his truths stay with us and his disclosures send us afield for more truth,—qualities all preaching does not possess. “To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family the happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.” This is commonplace truth put with such finality and authority that, if it has not become scripture, it has at least served as a text for not a few preachers.

Nervous invalidism as a specific problem is in one way or another everybody's concern. The invalid himself naturally wishes to get well; but he should recognize that it is possible to be sound in mind even though limited in bodily strength, and should come to see with peculiar clearness some of the needs and dangers and opportunities that illness may bring. We are apt to construe health too narrowly, and to forget the relations of both health and illness to character and insight.

One of the most striking and pathetic figures of the nineteenth century was Friedrich Nietzsche. A radical aristocrat, a radical enemy of religion, a prophet, he shared the fate of the prophet and the radical man. He was a poet rather than a philosopher, not one calmly to weigh the issues of his mind. He was a zealot with a mission, a fiery genius, whose torch, unsteady at times, flared into madness in his latter years. So great was the strain of thought that his mind was literally consumed by his zeal for a vast, a revolutionary cause.

Whatever title to intellectual distinction the future historian may deny to our time, its right to be called the age of encyclopaedias will hardly be challenged. We have general encyclopaedias on a scale almost Chinese and special encyclopaedias of every branch of learning, science, and art. No generation has put so much of its time—profitably or unprofitably—into co-operative enterprises for alphabetizing all knowledge. We have had within the last few years two large Bible dictionaries—one of them with two supplements; a Jewish Encyclopedia in twelve volumes; new editions of the standard Protestant encyclopaedia of Herzog-Plitt-Hauck and of the Catholic encyclopaedia of Wetzer and Welte-Hergenröther-Kaulen; the beginning of a great Catholic Encyclopaedia in English and of an encyclopaedia of Islam; and now the first instalment of an Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, which will extend to at least ten volumes.

The ruins of the ancient capital of Israel lie on a large, detached hill about six miles northwest of Nablus and twenty miles from the Mediterranean. The hill rises about three hundred and fifty feet above the surrounding valleys, and about fourteen hundred and fifty feet above the sea. It is enclosed by mountains, some of which reach a much greater height. At its base the hill has the appearance of being between four and five miles in circuit. The ascent is everywhere steep, but, owing to a saddle connecting with the mountains on the east, is less steep on that side than on the others. Like all the mountains about it, the hill is covered with large artificial terraces, constructed to prevent the washing away of the soil and to make cultivation easier. The surface of these terraces has a gentle slope, but their sides are in many places so steep as to be climbed only with great difficulty. The entire hill is under cultivation, and there are extensive olive orchards, interspersed with fig and pomegranate trees.